


Action Sequences

by Ark



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Angst, BDSM, Blood Drinking, M/M, Sex, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-13
Updated: 2012-03-13
Packaged: 2017-11-01 22:23:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/361940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ark/pseuds/Ark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At first it was unexpected, like a bomb going off. Now it's something else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Action Sequences

Damon won't stop, can't stop. Alaric gasps, “Easy,” more for Damon than himself, since Damon's doing a fine job of pinning Alaric hard enough to gravel that it'll take a lot of time or vampire blood to undo the damage to torn flesh.

“Can't,” Damon murmurs, blind with adrenaline, and Alaric understands, and decides it's going to be a vampire blood sort of day. He takes all of it, Damon and the pain and the gravel digging a thousand sharp tiny mouths in where his skin is bared to it.

Behind them, the smoldering remains of a blown-up house that they blew up burns.

Alaric on his knees reaches for Damon's hand, wrenches it up, bites hard into a finger, which one he couldn't tell, only that vampire blood like life and fire and death fills his mouth and then he doesn't feel pain anymore.

Can swim in gravel, float on it, take Damon's cock thrusting with an urgency without end, grinding Alaric into stone like they're grinding in a mortar. He can do anything with Damon's finger in his mouth and Damon's blood feeding back on him.

“So fucking good, Ric, god,” is all that Damon says. All of Damon is focused on driving against him and fucking him into what would have been actual physical danger if it hadn't been for all the blood. Around them, the air is frequently on fire.

***

Some of the first few times had been a lot more awkward. For a while they'd kept this side confined and saved for certain situations and otherwise untouched. It'd become customary and unaddressed. Alaric treated it like a strange off-shoot of hunting.

He and Damon worked in perfect concert and took down their targets with bravado and adrenaline and afterward they were so turned on no words were needed or sufficed.

Initially it had been kinda strange, especially with the silence they sometimes kept. It got better when they started talking about it. One day Alaric surprised himself by anticipating aloud.

“Gonna fuck you so hard after this,” he said as they paced toward a country bar where bad vampires were drinking.

And Damon had slanted him a look full of equal anticipation and said, “Yeah?”

Instead of it being weird, Alaric had nodded, and said, “Yeah, there,” and Damon's eyes had followed where he'd pointed: a low slope overlooking the bar, where wildflowers grew.

“Poetic,” said Damon, and they'd kicked ass, and Alaric had rolled him in the flowers.

***

At some indefinable point it starts to feel more like dating. Maybe the night Damon is carefully drying the wet dishes Alaric passes him, making neat stacks of them. Elena is sleeping over at Bonnie's, and dinner had been eggplant parmesan and alcohol.

They don't say anything cleaning up, but then Alaric breaks two plates and a coffee mug when he turns off the water and turns to hitch Damon onto the kitchen counter. He silently promises to find replacements and finds it's more than worth it for the surprise and satisfaction in Damon's gasped approval.

Alaric spends a long time sucking Damon's cock and making him ready with lips and tongue and fingertips. When he pushes Damon's thighs apart and takes him hard amongst the broken shards of dishware he makes Damon cry out in spite of himself. His head is back against the paler tile of the counter, clothes torn away, a meal for Alaric, who's starving anew.

That night, after Alaric spends himself spectacularly in Damon, he says, “Bed?” like it's a casual thing, and Damon says, brain blown out his ears, “Yeah,” like that's cool. They sleep on a soft mattress together for the first time all the way through and fuck first thing in the morning, reaching for each other straightaway.

***

It's Damon, so it's never smooth sailing. Alaric doesn't exactly have the best track record himself.

It had been hard to forgive Damon for killing him so callously, to puff himself up around Elena, giving in to a petulant fit. He'd been tragically sorry, but it was too little too late.

If Alaric had a nickel for the number of times he'd thrown a drunk or cajoling Damon out of his bed or bedroom or the bar-stool next to him in the time thereafter he'd be a billionaire.

Then it'd been enough of a space to properly punish them both, and Mason Lockwood and the ghosts had happened, and they'd been back together on a case.

After his sort-of apology Damon had pressed up against Alaric in the cave-wall in the dark and said, “Don't go. Just don't go. I'll say anything you want me to. I'll recite apologias.” He'd sunk to his knees before Alaric could or could want to stop him, taken Alaric's already-hard cock into his mouth with perfect familiarity, and they'd gotten right back to it.

***

One evening at the Grill Alaric drags Damon out the door and to the backseat of whoever's car they'd driven here and flattens him hard against smooth felt. His car, then, no Italian leather. He thinks this isn't quite normal or how normal people behave.

“We're more fun,” says Damon, when he expresses that. “But why are we here now, having fun?”

Alaric has his mouth fastened to Damon's neck, is pushing him face-forward and down into the upholstery. He's getting Damon and himself naked with equal ease and urgency.

“You were flirting,” says Alaric, yanking hard at Damon's collar.

“Ah-ha,” says Damon, helping to remove his shirt. “Probably?”

“Sometimes I can handle watching it,” Alaric says. They're stripped soon enough, hard naked bodies fitted against each other in the cramped backseat. Alaric makes rough use of the lube they kept stashed in the carseat's pocket. A boy scout is always prepared. “Sometimes I can't.”

Damon is coming to slower-than-usual comprehension about Alaric's sincerity here, but he feels it soon enough. “Wow, Ric. In the lot at the Grill? With everyone inside?”

Alaric pushes three fingers into Damon, and Damon gets it. “Okay...okay. The lot at the Grill is good. It's freakin' great that everyone's inside,” and Alaric thrusts deep without any more preparation, just lube slicking the long length of his cock. Damon groans, but pushes back on him almost immediately, bracing crossed arms on the seat. He's never unprepared for what Alaric introduces. Never disapproving, at least.

“Who...” Damon's voice trails. Alaric's big hands span Damon's hips; grip his thighs, his buttocks, better positioning him in their scant space. Alaric pulls out halfway and watches the way he can make the muscles on Damon's lower back flutter and contract as he sinks back in. Damon tries speaking again: “...who was I flirting with, so I can do it again?”

Alaric is in so deep, so tight, he doesn't ever have to move, only it's even better when he does. “I don't remember,” he says.

Vague flashing image of Damon smiling and raising his eyebrows and letting his big eyes look at someone who wasn't Alaric. Christ, when had he gotten like this? That was how Damon spoke to people.

Damon's nails scratch across the plastic and cloth interior. Alaric is a crashing wave against him, screwing without surcease. “You know,” Damon pants, “This isn't going to deter me from further flirtation at all.”

“I have better deterrents,” says Alaric, and fucks him nearly until the Grill shuts up.

***

Damon has a long angry claw-swipe running across his ribs and a deeper nasty bite to the shoulder. Klaus had dropped off the remedy several hours before but it is still slow healing.

They drink bourbon quietly in bed. Damon is propped up against a high pile of pillows, looking slight for once, taking up less space.

“Sucks,” says Damon.

“Too close,” says Alaric.

A surprise werewolf attack shouldn't have been too much for them to handle but they had been dangerously off guard, laughing and teasing each other as they unloaded groceries from the car to the Salvatore porch. It had all happened too fast but at least their instincts hadn't failed them.

Dark flashes of eyes and big white teeth, the sound of too-close snarls, but after the first hit they were ready, Alaric with a knife in hand and Damon all vamped out. Eggs and orange juice and tomato sauce like thick blood spilled shattered from torn bags.

Then their instincts had done something else.

The werewolves were fast and even more dangerous to Damon than they were to Alaric, since no one could count on Klaus's benevolence with a cure, and if they killed Alaric he'd at least have a chance to distract them with his death and make it count and come back again later, while Damon got inside.

Only Damon wouldn't go inside. Damon kept throwing himself too close to precisely in front of Alaric, and he was messing up their usual rhythm, and Alaric was confused and pissed and concerned enough that one of the werewolves made for a break in their front and made it, enormous jaw clamping on Damon's shoulder, razor claws opening up gashes as it raked his skin.

Then they were both crying out in pain, Damon and the werewolf, going down in a heap as Alaric stabbed at the creature with savage precision. It released Damon with an ear-screeching yelp and turned on Alaric, but that was when Damon, though shocked with the savagery of the bite, managed to get his feet under the heavy furry body and kick it fifteen feet through the air.

They heard it land on the gravel by the boarding house with a crunch, then the squeal and bark of its fellow turning tail and fleeing.

By the time that Alaric has seen that Damon's wound was bad but hadn't torn out his throat, by the time he can stagger toward where the werewolf should be lying it's already gone: limped off somehow, or dragged bloodily and bodily away by someone else. _I'll check that later,_ Alaric thought, the vaguest of their worries now, already wheeling back to Damon.

The times when Damon really needed his help were rare and luckily far-between, but when they happened they were never happy. Damon had leaned heavily against Alaric, been half-dragged himself, to the couch in the library; and the next few hours were a blur of Damon's pain and Alaric's anxiety and too many people coming in and out and talking and leaving and coming back again.

Alaric thinks he might've signed his soul over to Klaus somewhere in the bargain but he doesn't much care.

All he cared about was the moment Klaus finally ripped open his wrist for Damon, Damon paper-pale and weak and already festering from the deepest bite. Damon drank a long stretch, then fell asleep for the first time since the attack, and Alaric had heard himself thanking Klaus, who was already leaving, and had received a strange reassuring squeeze on his elbow from Elijah, who followed his brother out.

In bed much later, with Damon propped up on a heap of pillows to rival the princess and the pea, Alaric says into his bourbon, “Too close. What the hell was that?” His relief at having Damon restored is profound, surprises him, really, but the stronger Damon gets and the more Alaric replays their night's action sequence on the porch in his head the pissier Alaric gets.

Damon knows he'd gotten unnecessarily in the line of jaws. Hates admitting mistakes, his lips drawn tight, nearly pressed to match the white of his face. He's beyond wan tonight, marked by lost blood and extra hurt.

“I'm sorry,” he says, echoing Alaric's pose and addressing his drink, the first time he's really said those words in context. They fit his broad mouth oddly. “I screwed us up. I just couldn't...I couldn't see you die again. You know? Not for a pair of rabid puppies.” He drinks deeply, then puts the glass aside and looks at Alaric. “Wasn't my call to make, though.”

“No,” Alaric agrees, glad that they're agreeing. “It wasn't.”

Before he has to ask him to say it, Damon says, “I can't swear it'll never happen again. I _can't_. I trust your skills, though, man, you're a force of fuckin' nature. It's not that. It's just...”

“Yeah,” says Alaric, letting some of the tension out of his shoulders. He drains his glass dry and leans across to set it next to Damon's. “I get it.”

They watch each other quietly. Then Alaric says, since it's been a wretched awful night and Damon has born the brunt of it, “I was trying to get in your way, too.” He hadn't exactly been cooperative himself under attack.

“You always are,” says Damon. “It's one of my favorite and least-favorite things about you.” He props himself up on his elbows a little and his lips are soft now when they brush Alaric's. A dry, close, tired kiss, lacking Damon's normally tempestuous heat. He drops back too soon, with a wince and a reflexive touch at his torn shoulder.

Yawning, eyes closing, a shutter over their brightness, Damon says, “Will you stay?”

Maybe Alaric should say something sarcastic, to dispel the weight of their bodies lying so close like this in bed. They lie stretched out and partially clothed, skin meeting here and there. It's too intimate to deny unless he denies it.

Instead he pulls as much of Damon as he can as carefully as he can into his arms. Forms his body into a closed bell curve around Damon. Twists and threads and tangles as much of them as can be together. “Try and make me leave,” says Alaric.

***

That morning when they wake up Damon's completely healed and utterly ravenous. All the way down to the dank dark torture-basement seems a long way to go when Alaric has plenty and has emerged from the werewolf-rendezvous with hardly a scratch.

Damon, practically panting for it, is about to go for blood, but Alaric stills him with a strong arm looped around his waist.

“Why go so far?” Alaric asks, tilting his head to the side to show a little neck, though he's not sure he'd let Damon drink there even though he's suddenly sure Damon should be able to drink from him. Damon's eyes like moonstones follow the exact curve of Alaric's throat. “Don't you want to?”

Damon is keeping himself very still. “Fuck me, Ric. What a fucking question. Do you have any fucking _idea_?”

“Only a little,” says Alaric. “Apparently it involves a lot of fucking.”

Damon's gaze is starving but won't give up caution. “Just understand. You have to understand. Do you understand? We do this, we can't undo this. I'll want to keep doing this.”

“I'll let you,” answers Alaric, with a grin, like it's easy. He's all shaggy bedhead hair and earnest eyes, one of Damon's favorite looks. “Provided you don't completely suck at it.”

Damon is on him with the deadly grace and fervor of the unnatural predator he is. “Tell me where,” he whispers, straddling Alaric's hips, biting his own lip with sprung fangs to avoid biting Alaric over-hastily. “Show me where I can.”

Alaric strains to think straight. Eventually he turns the softer flesh of his inner right arm toward Damon. His bicep is not inconsiderable. Damon liked to lick here sometimes anyway. It is a space where some hid tattoos, could keep them tucked against the body and away from prying eyes.

Damon nods, and the first time his fangs sink into Alaric's arm, Alaric's charged adrenaline and rapid-fire brain nearly responds by violently bucking him free. Only keeps still(ish) somehow because he'd asked for this, offered it.

Then Damon finds a vein and some of the sharpness recedes, and Damon's tongue is lavishing distracting pressure, and Damon is leaning low over Alaric and drinking from him.

This might be their favorite sexual position as well, Damon with all of his body's weight on Alaric, Alaric shuddering underneath him. It's starting to feel sexual, too, a gathering heady warmth in Alaric that settles in when Damon does.

Damon only tears his mouth away with extreme reluctance, chasing every drop and rivulet of blood. Alaric realizes he's closed his eyes a breath and opens them, meets Damon's ready, waiting stare. “As good as you hoped?” Alaric asks, though Damon's already long since revealed without words that it is even better.

“I can't really explain,” says Damon. “I think I had better demonstrate.”

“Sucker for a good presentation,” says Alaric, crossing arms behind his head. Out of the corner of his eye he can see the bleeding imprint of Damon's mouth, which turns out to be a small price for what's at least #1 or #2 on the list of the all-time best sex of his life.

***

Caroline discovers them making out -- to put it politely -- in the pantry off the kitchen of a formal party at the Lockwood's.

“Oohh,” she says, the sound like half an 'oh' and half an 'ooh.' “ _Now_ some stuff makes sense.”

They blink in concert back at her.

“Don't drink too much,” says Alaric cheerfully, like a hypocritical P.S.A. There's a three-quarters empty bottle on the shelf next to them, filched from the bar. “History test tomorrow!”

“Shut the door,” says Damon. “We found this place first.”

“No problemo,” says Caroline, flashing them a thumbs-up and a brilliant smile. “Turns out, Bonnie owes me forty dollars.”

She closes the door. Alaric dips his hand back beneath Damon's tuxedo waistband. “Well, that's done with. This town is going to be after us to choose China patterns soon.”

“I like a rococo style,” says Damon, pulling him back in.

***

Damon flares up badly at the Originals' ball. Out of his element, feeling besieged at his emotional pressure-points, he does what he does extraordinarily well, which is act out, cause a memorable scene and entirely too much trouble.

As a rule it's the worst sort of news when Alaric hears it first from Elena instead of Damon himself. Means things've really gone wrong, means that Damon despite his uncovered depths and their mutual evolution can't bring himself to send Alaric a fucking 140-character text message.

At the boarding house, Alaric finds Damon blisteringly, blindingly drunk, half-mad and slipping away from him. The texts from Elena had been urgent and apologetic for bothering so soon in his recovery but Alaric felt okay for having been recently dead, just hadn't expected to wake up to this.

He's blissed out on morphine for _one goddamned night_ after Elena had to stab him to death and complete and total hell goes ahead and breaks the fuck loose.

Damon is sitting with splayed legs on the couch, one bottle long since discarded and another long begun. He cradles it in his arms like a child. Says, “Go 'way, Ric. Tonight's not the night.” An astonishing amount of liquid vanishes under his next swallow. “Really glad you're alive and all. Hope you liked the orchids. But go away.”

He's drinking so much to kill the cravings, Alaric knows, to dampen and deafen the monster. Fucking fantastic, knowing that.

Alaric goes to the couch instead of away. Nudges Damon's slack thigh with his knee. Takes the bottle from his gripping grip.

Damon's eyes come up flashing. He's as close to a snarl as Alaric's seen in a very long time. Then he does it. He actually snarls, reminiscent of werewolves. The broad curve of his lips go scythe-like and his eyes flash dangerously and Damon makes a terrible sound, showing teeth.

Alaric blinks at him, makes his face unafraid, tries to tell himself he isn't. It's like staring at half of Damon. Half of him is here and the rest is all vampire.

No, not this. Not this again. Never this. They've come too far to go back. Alaric puts down the bottle and takes hold of Damon's hands. They ball into fists in his palms.

“Stop it,” Alaric says. “This isn't you, man.”

Elena's text had read, _damon snapped or something. im afraid he might do something crazy._

At first Alaric assumed that Elena was overreacting. Hoped that she was. It had been known to occur.

Before something attacked Alaric in the Gilbert house and Elena had put him down with her supernatural killing chops he and Damon had been supposed to meet for drinks and and after-drink sex as always. It was a weeknight, after all. How much could have happened while Alaric lay not quite dying?

Now he thinks Elena's texts had almost been trying to be gentle. Hadn't wanted to quite let him know how bad it was. Except.

After she'd filled in a few more details from the Originals' soiree and apologized again for bothering Alaric, her last communication came. _it was like looking at the old him_

Damon's eyes are round and alive and nearly feral in the firelight. He's built a tall fire and let it roar in the mantle. The flickering flames reflect back, washes his slate gaze in scarlet.

_This isn't you,_ Alaric had said, but it isn't precisely true; this is part of Damon, the worst most self-indulgent uncompromising part.

“Oh?” Nothing about Damon seems quite himself. “And what am I? I'm never not a problem for Elena. I'm an easy neck-snap to Stefan. Everyone still hates me, and you were dead. Again.”

“Got better,” says Alaric. Damon is still shaking his head, murmuring, demanding to know what he is.

Standing just over him at the couch, it's an easy angle for Alaric to jam the vervain dart tucked in his palm straight down into Damon's jugular. His hand doesn't hesitate, even when Damon's head jerks back and his expression changes from terrible to choking.

“I'll show you,” says Alaric.

***

Alaric knows a lot about restraining vampires. He knows some about breaking them, too. There'd been times in his early days of hunting when extracting information had been more valuable and satisfying than a mere sterile staking.

Damon doesn't need breaking quite but he needs a firm regrounding. He doesn't start to stir until the ropes. He'd been out the whole drive from the boarding house. It'd been a bitch and a half to drag Damon's dead weight bumping up the steps to the loft but Alaric had done it.

The headboard at Alaric's apartment had been chosen with precision. It is easy to slot handcuffs through the metal and tie knots in spacious loopholes. The end of the bed has a similar design.

Damon comes to dumbed down on vervain, naked on Alaric's wide mattress. His feet and one hand have already been drawn tight and fixed with heavy coils of rope like those found on big ships.

“Ow,” he says first, then appraises the situation and says, “The fuck, Alaric. What--”

“Said I was gonna show you what you are,” says Alaric, securing Damon's free hand before his strength can fully return and threaten the set-up. “But if you don't cooperate, I'm happy to blindfold you so you can't see shit. Have a selection of 'em.”

Damon growls, precisely, “ _Ow_.”

“Vervain-soaked ropes,” Alaric explains, sounding only a little sorry as he ties off a perfect last knot. He'd been an instructor in this badge skill when he was older in the scouts. “Woven from cured vervain stem fibers. Other restraints won't hold you.” He'd nearly said _your kind_ but it's only him and Damon here, no one and nothing else.

Damon fights the ties a long moment anyway, as expected, but Alaric's tricky knots intensify with the pressure, which he learns fast enough. His whole body arcs in the struggle, then collapses, slackening.

“Burns,” says Damon, in a softer voice.

“I know. Can't be helped. If I thought the cuffs would keep I'd use them.” Alaric reaches down to smooth wild black hair away away from Damon's wilder eyes. “Should we begin?”

Damon totally helpless to Alaric's whim is something between them that is utterly new, almost entirely new for Damon. This isn't exactly new for Alaric, however. He's very good at it, both while hunting and while in bed.

He doesn't drag it out past all their limits tonight, knowing that with every rub and chafe vervain throbs and bites deep where Damon is tied. But Alaric takes his time. He's good at this in a way Damon's never witnessed before, that Damon may not have known was in him but now can never forget.

Sex and all of its attendant practices had long fascinated Alaric and went often enough went cock-in-hand with the study of history. Damon thought him free-spirited, which Alaric was; Damon hadn't known the torments and ecstasies of the flesh Alaric had undergone and inflicted on others in his quest to achieve a more masterful knowledge.

For a very long while he keeps Damon aroused just to the perfect pitch-point before breaking away and not letting him approach the edge of satisfaction. Damon twists and turns and after his stubborn noise barrier is shattered, keens some.

Sometimes Damon is understandably angry, spitting curses and recriminations. Sometimes the insecurities that underlie his irrational impulses emerge and he wrenches out pained, angst-laced monologues. Sometimes he begs Alaric, saying soft, delicious, flattering things, before the next moan brands Alaric as a bastard. It's the most talk therapy that Damon's undergone since his early twentieth century residency in Vienna.

Later on Alaric brings out an arsenal of tools and toys, with some that Damon's seen before and some that he hasn't. He tells Damon to name the order of how he wants them applied. Makes Damon tell him.

Then he introduces them precisely in reverse, so that after an endless space of time they end with Damon's favorite: a cock-ring designed by Isobel to hold and excite a vampire exactly. Alaric had found the sketch amongst her things and built it to his ex-wife's thoughtful specifications.

Damon is so far-gone that he doesn't register when Alaric slips it on, but he's back when Alaric fixes it tight. Damon can't miss the metal bite of studs, the slim wicked vervain buckle. He's never been harder with Alaric, maybe never ever, blood rushed and caught in his throbbing cock past human endurance. This might kill a human actually.

Damon tosses his head, his only body part with any real mobility. He moans with final abandon, all censors given up or lost. His trembling thighs are smooth as polished marble but should be showing marks and welts and Alaric's handprints.

“Tell me what I can say to finish this,” he rasps, after he's long since said everything else.

“Tell me,” says Alaric, stroking Damon's straining cock with a motion that should be a tease but is now another torture. “Tell me what rules you now. What you are more than any other thing that you are.”

Damon's lids had been shut but now his eyes open like curtains lifting and are wider than they've been before. He looks composed like an illustration kept hidden in secret erotic books.

There's a silence where everything's excruciating, and then Damon's red lips that he's bitten through part and Damon says, eyes somehow impossibly wider as though he's only just uncovering it, “You.”

Alaric nods. “Getting warmer.” After the hours' adventures Damon hardly needs to be prepared for the last part of this. He'd begun begging to be fucked around the fifteen-minute mark. Now they're nearly there, with Alaric slowly moving into position over him and Damon staring dazedly up at everything and nothing. So close. “So close,” he tells Damon. He pushes the head of his cock in, just enough to make a statement, and stays waiting.

“You,” murmurs Damon again, like it's the only word that he can say.

For a moment Alaric wonders if he'd taken them too far for their first time like this. But Damon had been too far-gone already. Alaric has brought him back to here, to what they are, made him unable to conceive of anything but the inches that separate them.

Damon whips his head back and forth like shaking water from his hair or sand from his eyes. He comes more alive, groaning, trying to grind his aching cock against Alaric for friction, trying desperately to fight the circumference of the ropes and corkscrew himself down on Alaric. There are angry red lines and blisters at his wrists and ankles, the only places where marks can linger.

After an impressive attempt he stills somewhat. Turns to meet Alaric's look in full, and though his eyes are savage with want they are Damon's again.

“Getting hotter,” says Alaric. “Close to scorching,”

and Damon says, “Yours. I'm yours,”

and Alaric pushes all of himself inside Damon at once to prove it.

On some level Damon had known already but he'd needed to be shown the extent to which this was true. This was what he was, what they were, had become the most essential part of what he was. Without it he became unmoored. So Alaric tied him back down.

“That wasn't so hard after all, was it?” asks Alaric, then doesn't wait for an answer.

He fucks Damon harder and almost longer than he should, since the point has been made, has been so gloriously made, but it's so good and Alaric's been waiting a long while also.

He finally takes measured pity and bends Damon into a mind-bendingly explosive orgasm, only loosening the cinch of the cruelly precise cock-ring at the very last. When he does that Damon says part of his name, “Ric,” and then nothing else, coming with silence and seemingly endless momentum.

Alaric thrusts and licks and sucks and bites at Damon's bound body underneath him through it all and after. Once Damon's recovered enough to rejoin him Alaric undoes the ropes that hold Damon's hands but keeps his legs spread and bound with woven vervain.

Half-pain and half-pleasure is where they are at their best. Damon's arms can come around him now and they do but his ankles still burn with Alaric's knots.

No offense to the sex they had after the first blood-drinking but Alaric thinks then that this is surely #1 in terms of all-time goes. When he comes buried as deep in Damon as the laws of physics and physicality will allow one of his first thoughts through the haze is that he should have videotaped it.

Damon is running a tongue over his tenderized lower lip, looking speculative. Concerned over what's been said and done.

“Can we come back from this?” he asks Alaric, plaintive. They've seen too many things now, too much of each other. It's too deep now. The days of awkward hidden sex and casual congeniality seem fading memories, blurred pictures.

“From what?” says Alaric, and he leans down to French kiss him, like it's a regular weeknight.

***

It takes a little while to restore their regular patterns but when they do it's better than ever. There's an unspoken sort of understanding and sympathy between them that other people notice if they happen to be anywhere in the vicinity.

Damon schedules Stefan's parent-teacher conference as the last of the evening. With the door double-locked, all the blinds pulled and the lights off, Alaric does what he swore he wouldn't ever do and lets Damon have him on the big sturdy teacher's desk. That he's pretty much incapable of denying a suggestive Damon anything and all of Alaric's “wouldn't evers” have gone out the window is apparent when Alaric's argument lasts all of three seconds.

That it's long been a fantasy for them both is apparent in the rough way Damon pushes him down and takes him, first with Alaric's face pressed to wood, his body to stacks of ungraded essays; then he turns Alaric over and fucks him standing up, the desk the perfect height for it, thrusting fast enough that Alaric ruins all sorts of important paperwork he doesn't give a crap about, just hooks a leg around Damon to guide him deeper.

They only let themselves come when the creaking of the desk grows ominous. The quiet of the classroom with its neat rows of empty desks and the familiar smell of chalk settles around them.

Since he's already violated the school-sex boundary line Alaric doesn't care much anymore about rationing school supplies, and spends lazy moments of afterglow affixing tiny gold star stickers across the creamy parchment proffered by Damon's skin.

Damon allows for a star to be placed off-center on his forehead, than knits his eyebrows as though long-suffering. “My best-ever performance in school, I think, but now I'm _starved_ , and I won't push your no-drinking-in-Mystic-Falls-High-rule until next time. So. Grill, then boarding house? We've been Gilberting it up lately, think we embarrassed Elena with the whole laundry-room thing the other day.”

“Yeah,” says Alaric, smiling and flushing a little at the same time. “Good point.”

“You know,” says Damon, doing up the buttons on his shirt, “It's Friday night. As in, the start of the weekend. You could stay for the whole thing. Consider it a vacation.” He tilts his head, as though considering. “We could even go somewhere. Like a vacation. For the weekend, I mean.”

Every now and then Damon was the opposite of eloquent, but was no less endearing. “Sure,” says Alaric. “I know what you mean. That sounds like a plan.”

“After that, you could stay,” says Damon. “You could just stay.”

Damon swallows with Alaric looking at him from the semi-ruin of the desk top. “I mean--”

“I know what you mean,” Alaric says. He knows. Both of them know how long they've both been waiting for the saying of it.

He presses a little gold mark to Damon's lips with his thumb, seals them shut. The sticker holds a moment before moisture loosens and it falls free. He kisses Damon where the star had been.

“Okay,” says Alaric, and stays the weekend. Sometime after that, he makes a choice already made, and just stays.

  



End file.
